Sr. Manager Application Development-Search

The Sr. Manager Application Development plans, organizes, and administers the programs and activities of at least one major application development or support area. This position will manage teams in development, installation, and maintenance of integrated information technology.  This role will specialize within search platform management and strategy.

This position is located in Springfield, MO.

AREAS OF FOCUS

Search Strategy & Planning:

• Develop and execute a comprehensive search strategy aligned with business goals and customer needs.
• Define and report on metrics to measure search effectiveness.
• Conduct search analytics and customer behavior analysis to identify areas for improvement.

Search Platform Management:

• Manage and maintain Solr cloud clusters, ensuring high availability, performance, and scalability.
• Configure and optimize search indexes, schemas, and query pipelines.
• Implement and manage search relevance tuning, including boosting, weighting, and synonym management.
• Monitor search platform performance and troubleshoot issues.

Data Integration & Quality:

• Develop and implement data ingestion pipelines and processes.
• Ensure data quality and consistency for search indexing for a complex catalog.
• Provide a highly personalized search experience for all commerce channels.

Team Leadership & Collaboration:

• Lead and mentor search engineers and analysts.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product/stakeholders, engineering, and data science.
• Communicate effectively with stakeholders at all levels.

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS

• Manage the analysis, design, development, implementation, and testing of application projects utilizing the approved development methodologies and standards.
• Lead multiple teams to achieve results by providing direction, timely developmental feedback, and coaching
• Provide leadership and growth coaching for reporting teams; document strategies and objectives for all reporting team members to grow within the company.
• Build effective teams, allocate personnel, guide teams in using established best practices and collaborate with other managers on the development of new best practices and standards where needed.
• Lead decisions regarding hiring and promoting team members.
• Responsible for all new and modified systems in area of responsibility.
• Assess the value of projects and prioritize accordingly.
• Guide users in formulating requirements; advise on alternatives and on the implications of new or revised applications.
• Collaborate with key stakeholders to determine software project requirements and design, project prioritization and planning, and monitoring and reporting progress of all projects.
• Manage capacity planning and resource allocation, team operating, and capital budget planning process.
• Oversee third party evaluation and contract review.
• Maintain a broad knowledge of technology trends, equipment, and/or systems.
• Ensure team member compliance with O’Reilly policies and procedures, including Data Integrity, Software Development Methodology, Project Tracking, and all required regulatory standards.
• Actively lead the department; prepare and give presentations to the department where appropriate.
• Analyze project proposals and requirements.
• Conduct research and feasibility studies.
• Coordinate and manage the efforts of multiple application development teams.
• All other duties as assigned.

SKILLS/EDUCATION/KNOWLEDGE/EXPERIENCE/ABILITIES

Required:

• 12+ years of software development experience and/or leadership experience in an area applicable to O’Reilly
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or related field (10+ years O’Reilly software development or functional experience considered in lieu of degree)
• Proven experience in search relevance tuning, query optimization, and performance monitoring.
• Strong understanding of information retrieval principles and search algorithms.
• Experience with data integration and ETL processes.
• Experience with search analytics and reporting tools.
• Experience with cloud-based search solutions.
• Experience with Java and/or Python.
• Expertise in Solr and/or Elasticsearch configuration and administration.
• Proficiency in query languages (e.g., Lucene query syntax, Elasticsearch DSL).
• Familiarity with DevOps practices and tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with machine learning and natural